Sex permeates nearly every waking moment of Masters of Sex, a new period drama from the U.S. premium cable channel Showtime, makers of the Emmy-winning anti-terrorism drama Homeland, the droll comedy Californication and, until recently, Neil Jordan’s Renaissance-era costume drama The Borgias, an Ireland-Canada co-production of Toronto’s Take 5 Productions.

The sex in Masters of Sex is not the sweaty, physical act itself but rather the idea of sex, the relationship between ego and id, as defined by groundbreaking 1960s research pioneers William Masters, played in Masters of Sex by Michael Sheen, and Virginia Masters, played by Lizzy Caplan.

Masters and Johnson arguably changed the way educated, westernized societies regard sex with their books Human Sexual Response in 1966, followed by Human Sexual Inadequacy, in 1970.

Master of Sex — a 12-part dramatization of Thomas Maier’s 2009 book directed in part by Shakespeare in Love and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel filmmaker John Madden — is part biography, part morality tale, set in the time of Mad Men. The analogy is apt, if only because without Mad Men’s success, Masters of Sex might never have made it off the drawing board.

Masters of Sex is about the idea of sex — longing, desire and the need to be part of something greater than oneself. But as with Mad Men before it, Sex plays close attention to the period detail of the time, that moment in 20th-century history when the culture experienced a tectonic shift and the sexual revolution was no longer an abstract construct but real, and happening.

Johnson died in July at age 88. Masters died in 2001.

Sheen, the Wales-born actor best known for playing noted TV interviewer David Frost in Frost/Nixon and for playing former British prime minister Tony Blair in The Queen, notes that while talk of sex was taboo in the 1950s, when Masters of Sex begins its story with Masters as an obstetrician, gynecologist and social psychologist at St. Louis’ Washington University, it’s still uncomfortable for many people to talk about, and not just in polite company.

“Obviously things have changed in many ways since the ’50s when the show starts in terms of sexuality and how much access we have to images of it and information about it,” Sheen said last month in Los Angeles at the summer meeting of the TV Critics Association.

“The same problems apply, though, always. It doesn’t matter whether we know more about sex now or whether there’s a lot more access to it. The same problems — of intimacy, of dealing with other people, of connecting and being vulnerable with other people — still apply now, I think. That’s what the show is ultimately about.”

Masters of Sex breaks a number of barriers, and not just in terms of its nudity, Sheen said.

“There are a lot of risks in this show, not just nudity but emotional risks, the subject matter and how much of ourselves we’re investing in it,” Sheen said. “One of the most exciting things, for me, of doing this show is turning up on the set every day knowing you’re not going to have to switch off when you leave the set at the end of the day.

“It’s about your life. It’s about everything that’s going on in your life. I think it brought us very close together as a cast, but it was also quite demanding of the cast as well. We wanted everyone to feel comfortable about exploring this subject matter. And in season one, I feel like we’ve done that. There was no grey area. There was no ‘tee-hee-hee’-ing about it. It’s absolutely straightforward.”

Masters of Sex, in its present form, could only have been made as a premium cable series, Sheen said.

“One of the great things about TV right now, and the reason I think it’s going through a golden age, is that, because of the multi-episodic format and because of cable channels like Showtime that are at the absolute forefront of what’s being done today, you can take risks.

“Any subject matter is open to you,” Sheen said. “You’ve got amazing people working on it. You’ve got 12 hours, roughly, per season to tell a story. You can get to the complexity of a novel, almost. It’s very, very multilayered and complex. You can start to treat people and characters with the complexity that they deserve, that we all deserve.

“The problem is that in this modern age everyone wants to reduce everything to bite-sized, easy-to-understand pieces,” Sheen said. “Why I think people are responding so much to television at the moment is that it refuses to do that. It’s flipped that around completely, so that (characters) can be revealed for being the complex, interesting people that they are.

“We can have more compassion and understanding and feel more connected to people,” Sheen said. “I’ve been very moved by the experience of doing this show. It’s become very difficult for me to say, ‘Well, my character is,’ and then simply trot out three lines about it. It’s much deeper than that.”

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